Saiyid Muhammad Hadi (4 September 1863,

Hasanpur Hasanpur is a city and a municipality in Amroha district of Uttar Pradesh, India. The city is around 120 kilometeres from the national capital Delhi and 12 km from the NH-24. Hasanpur is known for its diversity and communal harmony. The town c ...

Awadh Awadh (), known in British historical texts as Avadh or Oudh, is a region in the modern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh, which was before independence known as the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh. It is synonymous with the Kośāla region of ...

– 5 June 1939,

Lucknow Lucknow (, ) is the capital and the largest city of the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh and it is also the second largest urban agglomeration in Uttar Pradesh. Lucknow is the administrative headquarters of the eponymous district and division ...

India India, officially the Republic of India (Hindi: ), is a country in South Asia. It is the seventh-largest country by area, the second-most populous country, and the most populous democracy in the world. Bounded by the Indian Ocean on the so ...

) was a British-trained official who worked in the United Provinces and served as a Director of Agriculture in

Bhopal State Bhopal State (pronounced ) was an Islamic principality founded in the beginning of 18th-century India by the Afghan Mughal noble Dost Muhammad Khan. It was a tributary state during 18th century, a princely salute state with 19-gun salute in a ...

. He worked on the improvement of sugarcane processing. The so-called Hadi or Bhopal method of

sugarcane Sugarcane or sugar cane is a species of (often hybrid) tall, Perennial plant, perennial grass (in the genus ''Saccharum'', tribe Andropogoneae) that is used for sugar Sugar industry, production. The plants are 2–6 m (6–20 ft) tall with ...

processing was a major improvement over early processes, with significant savings on losses. He was given the title of

Khan Bahadur Khan Bahadur – a compound of khan ('leader') and bahadur ('brave') – was a formal title of respect and honor, which was conferred exclusively on Muslim and other non-Hindu natives of British India. It was one degree higher than the title of K ...

for his contributions.

Life and work

Hadi came from a family of Baraha Syeds who had fled

Muzaffarnagar Muzaffarnagar is a city under Muzaffarnagar District in the Indian State of Uttar Pradesh. It is situated midway on the Delhi - Haridwar/Dehradun National Highway (NH 58) and is also well connected with the national railway network. It is kno ...

after the Sikhs invaded. A grandfather had been a military officer in Oudh and a collector of revenue in Sultanpur District. Hadi's father had been a Tahsildar in Pratapgarh during Mughal rule who practiced law after English annexation. Hadi studied at Sultanpur High School and was trained at the Royal College, Cirencester where he received the Holland Gold Medal. He was later deputed by the

Oudh The Oudh State (, also Kingdom of Awadh, Kingdom of Oudh, or Awadh State) was a princely state in the Awadh region of North India until its annexation by the British in 1856. The name Oudh, now obsolete, was once the anglicized name of ...

Talukdars to travel to America in 1888-89 to examine the possibility of technical education for Indian students. He was deputed by the Secretary of State to study in Paris under

Louis Pasteur Louis Pasteur (, ; 27 December 1822 – 28 September 1895) was a French chemist and microbiologist renowned for his discoveries of the principles of vaccination, microbial fermentation and pasteurization, the latter of which was named afte ...

between 1882 and 1889 and then joined the Agricultural Department in the United Provinces. Hadi worked under W. H. Moreland in the

United Provinces of Agra and Oudh The United Provinces of Agra and Oudh was a province of India under the British Raj, which existed from 1902 to 1921; the official name was shortened by the Government of India Act 1935 to United Provinces (UP), by which the province had been ...

. He was appointed assistant magistrate and collector 5 April 1890. Assistant director of land records 1891. Superintendent of inland emigration 1893. He became Deputy Commissioner for Pratapgarh on 4 January 1911.

Work on sugarcane processing

From around 1904 he began to examine sugar production in the United Provinces. He was awarded the title of

on 1 January 1907 for his work in developing the so-called Hadi process for refining jaggery from sugarcane with reduced losses. The Hadi method was involved in the reducing losses in the production of ''rab'' (massecuite) and a reduction in the inversion of sucrose by controlling the heat and by the use of centrifugation. Hadi also modified the construction of the pans or ''bels'' in which the cane juice was boiled. The method also involved using slow heating with dilute sodium carbonate and juice of '' Hibiscus esculentus'' as a clarifying agent. Scum that floats to the top is removed by hand and no lime is used. This resulted in a yield of 40% sugar from ''rab'' as opposed to 20% in the older process that involved filtering the viscous ''rab'' through jute bags by having people walk over them. He also attempted to produced refined white sugar while in Bhopal around 1908 but this was a failure. These methods were made completely obsolete by the 1930s by factory production systems based on innovations made in the West Indies and Java.

Publications

Hadi's major publications include: * A note on breeds of cattle in the district of Bahraich, Oudh (1895) * A monograph on dyes and dyeing in the North-Western Provinces and Oudh (1899) * The Sugar Industry of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (1902) *Clarke, G. & S.M. Hadi (1909) Sugarcane at the Partabgarh Experimental Station 1908. Calcutta: Government Press. *

Indian Sugar Industry Indian or Indians may refer to: Peoples South Asia * Indian people, people of Indian nationality, or people who have an Indian ancestor ** Non-resident Indian, a citizen of India who has temporarily emigrated to another country * South Asi ...

(1929)

References

{{Authority control Indian agronomists 1863 births 1939 deaths